The Real Origins Of Ancient Egypt | Immortal Egypt | Timeline

Can't we get up? This is brilliant. It's obviously an iconic image taking a camel ride through the pyramids. It surely encapsulates the spirit of Egypt, but that image is completely misleading because there were no camels here when the pyramids were there. built four and a half thousand years ago and that's what

ancient

egypt

is instantly recognizable but too often completely misunderstood, so i will try to change that and good luck will spin the great pyramid of giza, the final resting place of king khufu to more than 140 meters. From the bottom up, it's no wonder it still draws crowds and the occasional Egyptologist.

It's hard to put it into words, but we are now entering the depths of this iconic monument of

ancient

Egypt. It is a great care, although it is a very busy iconic monument. It's out there and as we set foot on this journey upwards it's a brilliant metaphor for the way the ancient Egyptian civilization literally rose from the ground to a true zenith, so come with me and I'll show you something

real

ly brilliant because the pyramids are

real

ly just the tip of the iceberg oh oh flipping so this was all one big overwhelming city that is absolutely magnificent in this series I'm going to explore the history of what I consider to be the greatest civilization in the world with over 4000 years of history that has shaped our world and left unmistakable marks that can still be read today.

I will be investigating every nook and cranny of little-known graves. It's amazing. I have never been to a tomb like this before in the hidden corners of vast monuments it is like being on top of the world, isn't it? Yes, we're in the tub of Karnak, so it's no surprise that weird and wonderful theories about ancient Egypt come up all the time, but what I find so surprising is that this is the most surprising thing. This intriguing civilization was actually created by people not unlike you and me and that's the story. I want to tell a story full of secret treasures, dark facts and sometimes controversial theories.

This mask was originally made for someone else and for the first time. We will reconstruct everything from the first Egyptians to the last of the pharaohs. Wow, look at that look, oh, that's, oh, that's so beautiful. Welcome to my story of ancient Egypt. The big question is how did ancient Egypt begin? Where did the early Egyptians and their extraordinary culture come from this

immortal

civilization that took thousands of years to develop, so putting it all together is a daunting task, but bear with me because it is absolutely fascinating, but we won't start with huge monuments but with some enigmatic clues.

You could easily overlook this es curta, about a hundred kilometers south of Luxo, unless you're an archaeologist, you almost certainly won't have heard of it because there are no great temples or royal tombs to admire, but high up in the cliffs you can see real signs of ancient life here thousands of years before the pyramids and this is where our story begins. Welcome to Kurta Joanne. Thank you very much for letting me come here. It's incredibly exciting. It's the first time you're here. I guess nothing escapes clarity. Eye of Dr. Dirk Hoyger and he has something very special to show me.

Not many people have been here before you because it's a fairly recent discovery. These rock carvings reveal a surprising story about the beginnings of Egyptian life. He is nineteen thousand years old. complete image gallery with its own hippopotamus back line very short tail thin legs belly line front legs and mouth shown you are probably smiling but then again a nipple is always smiling but another type of animal is by far the more common here. cattle, not just cattle, there are the powerful aurochs, the wild benefit, the wild cattle and the extremely powerful images that seem to be in motion, they are the charge towards the orders, aren't they?

These wild aurochs were ancestors of the domestic cow almost twenty thousand years ago. Beef was the main thing on the menu, perhaps fifty percent of their diet was composed exclusively of rocks, so they were experts and masters in representing this animal. It is always at the top of the cliff, in very prominent positions that give an excellent view of what must have happened. In Paleolithic people's hunting grounds it is easy to imagine these early hunters here as they tracked their prey, but the landscape would have been very different from today because back then this was a savannah grassland, a green and fertile region.

Do we have any idea why these creatures were carved into these rocks here we can guess joanne but we don't know maybe they wanted to influence the hunt maybe this is some kind of hunting magic it really is magical to sit here and imagine the first nomadic peoples of Egypt passing through this place. and portraying on these same rocks the animals they saw around them, human figures and ships joined the animals as the carvings became increasingly strange, but these carvings are also the first glimpse of the wonderful things that lie ahead. come, these are the first signs of what makes ancient

egypt

good, ancient egypt in terms of its ancient landscape, this evolved under dramatic circumstances ten thousand years ago, gravity tilted the entire earth off its axis about half a degree and this had a profound effect on the climate and as the world began to change, Egypt would never be the same again These early people were nomadic, seasonally mobile shepherds who moved after the reigns of summer and these rains truly were the life force that It brought life that created the greenery that wild animals depended on but of course with climate change these rains began to dry up.

Well, you can cut off the rain, the decrease in rainfall forced both animals and people to move towards large lakes that formed during the rainy season. One of those areas is Nabta Playa, 100 kilometers southwest of a swamp, and here these nomadic hunters began to settle in communities, but they still depend on the annual summer reigns. They needed to predict exactly when they would return and so they looked to the night sky to welcome at the beginning of time literally because this is the oldest calendar in egypt it is around 7,000 years old this circle of stones from nabta playa is the oldest evidence of how egyptian meteorologists became astronomers they aligned their center stones with the circumpolar stars visible in the night sky all year round when the sun appeared directly overhead the stones cast no shadows the mid-summer rains were approaching this meant that the animals would drink the plants would grow and the world would survive another year, so in In many ways this circle represents the solution to the very real problem of survival, but the Egyptians would take this one step further.

I think what's really cool about these mini monumental markers is that this is the oldest example we have of the way the Egyptians were lining up their monuments with various things towards the sky with the cardinal points and from now on every tomb, every temple, each monument will be aligned with the heavens towards the same gods if the stars under the rain were so closely linked then this world and the next must be won and the same and this has been described as the oldest sculpted stone monument in Egypt and dates back to around 5000 BC. C. this piece of sandstone was quarried over a mile away from where it was eventually discovered, this certainly suggests a sort of sense of community where people were already working together to achieve a desired goal;

In this case, the stone was placed in place and then there are clear signs that it has been sculpted into a specific shape. Gotta be with me on this one, but some believe it's actually a cow with its large hindquarters and this sculpted head. Now the cow was a vital part of everyday life for these people, it was a source of meat, milk and blood. sources of protein they needed to stay healthy and yet so important was the cow that they chose to take to the afterlife with them to sustain them on a spiritual level and this is the very beginning of the great cow goddess Hathor Hathor may have begun as a source of milk and meat, but over time she would be loved and idolized by millions of Egyptians, since she represented love, joy, beauty and motherhood, and although her image develops from a realistic animal to a female face with ears of cow, this may be the first time Hathor appears.

However, Hathor is only one among a multitude of gods and goddesses that the Egyptians could not get enough of over the centuries, hundreds, if not thousands, of deities arose, each with a specific purpose and appearance, some had human form, others had animal heads. could be man woman even androgynous it seems that there were few aspects of life that did not have their own gods we know that in the early times their gods resembled familiar things the world around them elements of nature and certainly animals and over time the animals their forms their characteristics distilled into this type of divine figure each worshiped for a different quality in the case of the ram were worshiped for their procreative powers in the case of the cow for their maternal instincts, so of course you have quite creatures different, the dangerous creatures, those that lived in the confines of the Egyptian world, the lions, the crocodiles, the jackals, but it was not just a matter of finding the appropriate divinity, but of gaining power over them, the goddess Sekhmet was a fierce one. lioness and bringer of death to humans, so the Egyptians transformed her into a deity as a way to control her destructive powers by a worshiping segment.

It was believed that she could be placated and transformed into a more benign deity on so many levels that the Egyptians were trying to harness nature to affect the way nature in turn affected them in many ways. Egypt's unique religion was the glue that held society together, uniting the population and underpinning almost every aspect of life, it is everywhere in tombs and temples in everyday life and yet, there is another even more fundamental element without which the ancient Egypt would never have existed. Later Greek historians noted that Egypt was a gift from the Nile and they were right because as the climate continued to change, the desert lakes eventually dried up leaving the Egyptians with only one source of water, this is an incredibly special place located in the Modern Sudan.

However, it constitutes the very source of Egypt, but it is the place where two great rivers meet, the White Nile and the Blue Nile, which combine here to form the longest river in the world. Flowing from the heart of Africa into the Mediterranean Sea for much of the year, the wide, sluggish White Nile is the main source of water until annual rains in the Ethiopian highlands swell the fast-moving Blue Nile. Today, the modern Aswan Dams stop these floods, but until the 20th century, enormous volumes of water and fertile silt surged downstream to flood the entire Nile Valley, bringing life and fertility to the desert that is Egypt.

This annual flooding of the Nile was the most important event in the life of every ancient Egyptian as its life-giving waters brought nutrients and minerals that enriched the soil along its banks and this allowed agriculture to flourish. Egypt is blessed with some of the most fertile land in the world where farmers can grow everything from sweet corn and garlic to bananas and sugar cane. and cotton is very far away, it is quite intensive agriculture, isn't it? The land gives a lot to people, right? Yes, but we also have to give the earth rest. We grow once and leave it for a month and then after using the soil. grow back, it's amazing that it only needs a month of rest and then it can be planted again, yes, sometimes 15 days, sometimes a month, yes, but it really emphasizes that this land of Egypt has always been so rich and so generous with people.

It has always given people everything they need and it is the Nile that turned this desert land into a paradise and seven thousand years ago people who could no longer survive in an increasingly desert landscape were forced to migrate to it. as its only source of water, so Ancient Egypt took shape when these peoples came together along the banks of the Nile, in the north, settlements clustered around the delta and the Fiom and in the south, around the Kenner curve, this was the beginning of the so-called two lands of Egypt, Upper and Lower Egypt, which developed into two different cultures, but what they both had in common was the amazing fertility that was replenished each year thanks to the miracle of the nile The Cab, located south of the Kennebend, is one of the first settlements in Upper Egypt and, while it may lack the wow factor of In the Pyramids, it is actually much more revealing to see traces of this amazing evolution because here we can see how a The nomadic lifestyle was soon replaced by a settled social structure and, althoughIt was a slow and gradual process, archaeologist Elizabeth Hart can identify each stage of this transformation.

Wow, you work in an enclave, but it's much cooler down here, it's actually lovely, so at this level we have barren soil where no one lived and then around 4200 BC. C., there are layers of silt from the Nile flood followed by wind-accumulated sand and then another layer of silt and then more sand and here you can see very well a thin layer of Nile silt rising and flooding and then the sand and here we have a hearth feature, which tells us that humans actually lived in these and entering the Nile Valley and then coming back and we also found many pot fragments and stone tools in these layers.

You know it may be a small space, but people's real lives unfold within it, right? We have thousands of years here when we started, people were just moving to the Nile Valley, they were just starting to farm and at the end here we have pharaohs and a whole united Egypt. It's really impressive if you think about all the changes that occurred. this piece of sand, although we are still centuries away from the great pharaonic monuments, you can still find traces of the lives these ancient people lived if you look closely enough, very little has survived except tons of pottery, yes, this is uh, yes, so there are five. thousand years old five thousand years old these vessels help us identify when this early society began producing a surplus of food a fundamental transition that required robust ceramics for the storage of large scale production of food and beverages these bread molds from a A little later they are one of the most common finds, so you heat the mold, then the dog gets into it and from the heat of the mold the bread is baked, but this comes in massive quantities.

These are beer jars, ah, bread and beer, Egyptian staples. oh nice, better beer mug, these are the nuts and bolts of how Egyptian chronology came together in the early days, aren't they? Yes, pottery is especially critical to understanding how people lived, but living in Egypt was only half the story because what really sets the ancient Egyptians apart is their view of death. For them, death was not the end of life but a new beginning, a transformation of the world of the living into an eternal afterlife, and such a belief would shape Egypt's most mysterious practice and my favorite subject. mummification, although the

origins

of this enigmatic tradition are only now becoming clearer, the burial of its dead had great significance from the earliest times.

This is a typical burial from around 3400 BC. The body is curled up in a fetal position and here it is placed inside a reconstructed pit surrounded by belongings that he may have had in his earthly life such as ceramic jewelry and a palette for preparing cosmetics, everything that was important to him in life. accompanied until death and I think that is quite significant because it shows that already five and a half thousand years ago, the Egyptians wanted to take everything, they clearly believed that something happened beyond death. Death was simply a transition to another state of existence in which you continued to live and it was assumed that you would need everything you needed in your life.

On Earth his body was mummified naturally in the hot desert sand, but its placement here may not have been accidental because even when dead the body had to be preserved to house the soul for eternity - a skeleton simply wasn't good enough. skeletons bones We are very, very anonymous and yet when the soft tissue, skin and hair are present, we are ourselves and that is exactly what this individual represents. Being face to face with one of the early Egyptians gives us an idea of ​​the development of his ideas about the afterlife. It started as something practical, burying the dead in a relatively small space under cover, and then it developed these layers like symbolism, the fetal position, this idea of ​​rebirth in the other world, it's almost like the seed from which the Egyptian funerary system emerged. . the belief system evolved this is the beginning of a process that would be repeated a million times throughout Egyptian history this is a combination of the esoteric backed by the practical that really sums up the Egyptians in a nutshell from the beginning the Egyptians were masters of making sense of their world no matter how complex and disconcerting it may seem to us, and this same ability to bring order is also found in the way they structured their primitive society, adopting levels of bureaucracy that border on the obsessive in ancient times. city ​​of Abydos.

Site of Egypt's first royal cemetery, archaeologists found the

origins

of a system we still have to endure today. It is very appropriate that this city of death was the excellent place of the first means of calculating that other taxes of great certainty come from the evidence. small bone and ivory tags like these, dating to around 3250 BC. C., the originals are probably the size of a postage stamp and it can be seen that each one is engraved with images of animals, birds, plants, etc., and each one is perforated. to hang on a chest or ceramic vessel that would have contained flax grain and oil and these symbols are believed to represent the regions that produce these products that were later brought here to inhabit us and that are believed to have been sent as tax payments.

These small labels show how these early peoples were already able to collect duties over a vast geographical area. Some experts even believe that these symbols can be vocalized by turning simple drawings into sounds, making this the oldest known writing in the world. Isn't it interesting that the oldest writing in the world was not? Developed to express a great outpouring of emotion or great expressed passion, it was simply a means of calculating taxes. These symbols soon developed into a sophisticated writing system of elegant signs that we call hieroglyphs, which means sacred carvings and these signs represented all aspects of the Egyptian world that were only translated in 1822 with the discovery of the Rosetta stone and a common language since goods were transported between the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt.

The people of Lower Egypt had also developed trade links with the rest of the ancient world, but as more. Warlike regions began to emerge in Upper Egypt. It soon became clear that the Nile had given birth to two very different and distinctive cultures and, in many ways, the only thing they really had in common was this great river. The inevitable clash between these cultures is recorded in what many consider the founding document of ancient Egypt, taking the form of a giant ceremonial cosmetic palette. This is an exact copy of the original Nama palette and, however idealized and embellished, it represents the crucial moment when the Nama king of the south defeated his northern enemy a split second after this. the mace falls on the head of this enemy from the north and he is executed they kill him he is no longer nama he himself is still the first king of a united egypt and what this means is that the entire country is now united under the rule of one man that he is literally establishing himself as the god-king as the central figure at the pinnacle of the pyramid that forms Egyptian society and from him everything else flows.

Egypt is now the world's first nation state. What he did to ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt is here. Art shapes reforms. of religion and even the first hieroglyphic writing in the world this is the name of nama the catfish no and the chisel no no no the striking catfish as the first king of egypt narma is protected by the cow goddess hathor is next to horus the god falcon of royalty and is dressed in the same paraphernalia as all the kings who succeed him, he has a tie on a false beard to emphasize his virility and his strength and of course this is combined with the bull's tail, it is a characteristic Wonderful, this idea could just be tied up a bit. tail on the back of the belt and then takes the power of a bull.

This palette is the oldest historical document of Egypt. It is the model for how each future pharaoh will be portrayed in the company of the gods, but perhaps most significant is Nurma's striking pose. The powerful image with the mace raised will be repeated endlessly throughout the long history of Egypt. This is a horrible way to die to have your brains beaten out, and yet even this the Egyptian artist can show in an almost balletic pose. He has been disinfected. He has been elevated. to a work of art and yet the message still comes through. For the next three thousand years, each of Egypt's subsequent rulers would attempt to link themselves to the first Pharaoh of Egypt to rule legitimately and successfully.

They had to be absorbed by the complexities of the Egyptian hierarchy. In both this world and the next, their names were recorded in a series of king lists, a kind of royal family tree, and the best preserved of them is here in the temple of Seti. The first in Tabaidos includes himself and 75 of his royal predecessors. Going back to the dawn of Egyptian history with the first king there, King Nama, and the other important detail about this is that it essentially emphasizes royal continuity because Seti has his own young son, Ramses, the crown prince, who actually read these names. on a piece of papyrus paper, so it's as if Seti was saying to the gods, look, I'm Pharaoh now and this is my son who will succeed me to become yet another name on this remarkable list.

In all of Egypt there were more than 300 pharaohs organized into 30 dynasties, but in the case of the first kings of Egypt, being an

immortal

male was not enough, they needed to demonstrate their divinity by exercising absolute control over their subjects and the evidence of this was found in the desolate desert surrounding the ancient city of Abados, this was the first time in Egypt. royal cemetery, the original version of the valley of the kings now that it is here, gives you a real idea of ​​the importance of this place to the ancient egyptians as as the wind comes down this valley and swirls around the sand , if you listen very carefully, you can hear a whisper, a whisper believed to be the voices of the dead themselves and here the first kings of Egypt were buried inside huge underground burial chambers like this one, the location of the final resting place of the third king Pharaoh of Egypt, one of the greatest. and the most complex tombs of the first dynasty and, although it has been recovered in the sand, it clearly demonstrates the power that the jury still wielded even in death.

He himself was buried here in the central chamber, but around 318 subsidiary tombs of his courtiers not only a little further away, many others were also buried in total. 587 people accompanied this man to the next world, which is pretty incredible, but there is evidence of a more sinister twist: the fact that this entire tomb was sealed at the same time suggests that these people may have been victims of ritual sacrifices, perhaps even ritual stabbings as depicted in the art of the period, and certainly such power over life and death would give any king divine status. Now later kings seem to have realized that killing all their courtiers at once was not best. using people who, after all, were a valuable resource to the state, he will be around to prepare the next king's cup of tea, although this cruel and short-sighted practice of ritual murder soon disappeared, it had nevertheless shown that the Egypt's rulers had complete control over their It constitutes an essential step on the route to the construction of the pyramids and, indeed, Egypt itself, but the Egyptian people were not slaves at that time, Egypt was a land of plenty where everyone could enjoy his generosity both in life and in death.

This is the later tomb of an official called eru qatar and here he is greeting us, he comes to the door of his own tomb emerging from the walls captured in all his splendor in his finery in his jeweled belt and his white linen and his kilt, even the details down to his little kind of pencil. The mustache looks a bit like Clark Gable, to be honest, the scenes in his colorful tomb depict a refined life that's a world away from Egypt's first farmers. We have Iroquatar sitting in front of a table of food offerings. There are fruits, vegetables, wine, etc., berries.

They are presenting offerings to sustain their soul. Irukata was the royal butcher, an important member of the court, and since royal courtiers no longer sacrificed for burial with their king, they could now make their own elaborate preparations for the afterlife. There are a couple of scenes here. of the house servants who make Iroquota's beds and his family are spreading the linen sheets they even bring a small fly swatter and the ancient Egyptian pillow the headrest there so that even in the afterlife heru qatar is comfortable hirokita's tomb is in Saqqara, a sprawling city of the dead for Egypt's first capital, Memphis, however, Zakara was not only the burial place of thecourtiers but also of kings and the site of a revolution in the construction of royal tombs and while previously the dead tended to be buried in the desert hidden almost here in Sahara high on the desert escarpment the dead were literally displayed until At this point the Egyptians attended to build their tombs and temples as their houses with organic materials of mud, broken wood and reeds that rarely survive but in the third dynasty, the great innovative king Joseph built his legacy into something much more permanent, since which he built in stone that could potentially last forever.

Joseph built this enormous stone wall to surround his tomb complex, although his architects and workers still drew inspiration from the natural world. You can see that the masons are just trying to understand how to really work with these things, what shapes to put them in, so we have the first hyperstyle column hall in Egypt, but it's taking the form of reeds joined together to make the kind of columns that They would have been in Joseph's palace by the Nile, but this of course is a house for death, this is a palace of eternity and it must be built of something as solid as stone, at the back of their complex there are an intriguing stone shrine. where I can come face to face with King Joseph himself, the sanctuary appears to be suffering from a serious case of sinking, and yet the Egyptians purposely built it on this very definite slope.

It has these two holes here where modern tourists can see Joseph, but Joseph can see. you can actually see beyond them because this face is the true north, it looks towards the northern stars which the Egyptians called the imperishable ones and so upon dying Joseph's soul could rise and merge with these stars, so he He would also be imperishable and he would also never die to ensure that his soul could live on in Joseph's body a safe place to rest was needed within a tomb truly fit for a king most of the burials were topped by a simple single building floor called mastaba, which means bench, but joseph did something radical that josem really wanted to impress with his funerary monument so he built another step on top of it. i think joseph must have quite liked the effect that this gave and so they built a third step, a fourth step, a fifth step, a sixth step, when they stepped back and looked, they realized that they had built the first pyramid of Egypt.

Quite impressive, the step pyramid is over 60 meters high and still dominates the landscape of Sacara at the time it was the largest building. on earth reinforcing Joseph's status as a living god in the grandest of ways, he certainly secured his place in Egyptian history with ancient visitors flocking here to marvel at his achievements now Joseph had created a true landmark but he also created the first tourist attraction from egypt if you come with me i will show you the evidence because here we have what many tourists still leave today grateful graffiti and this is the original handwriting of a couple of ancient visitors from around 1300 BC.

C. who were so impressed by what they saw that they described Joseph's pyramid. like heaven was in it and they give joseph credit for being the inventor of the stone, but why did joseph build this? Was it just an ego trip or an exercise in personal vanity or was it designed to show the world how far Egypt had come because in just a few centuries, these disparate peoples had come together to create the world's first nation-state. Egypt was now an unstoppable power, a nation unified both politically and culturally under a single ruler whose authority was unlimited, but it was not only the king who could achieve immortality. because the man who designed and built Joseph's pyramid was destined to be even more famous than the pharaoh he had served.

The base of this statue once held a full size figure of King Joseph, but carved into its base is also the name of its architect and here I can see it with this reed, the owl and then the little mat with a small loaf of bread which reads and here is the man himself, although most likely a commoner by birth, Imhotep rose through the ranks to become one of the most powerful officials in Egypt. the royal chancellor, the prime minister, he was even made high priest of the sun god, he was the best local boy, he became good because he later gained a reputation as a scholar, as a great healer and was famous throughout Egypt .

Worshiped as a god, Imhotep represents the ultimate in social mobility, a type that was certainly possible within Egypt's unique society. This was a society where ideas were often taken to the extreme, with one and a half million people united by an absolute belief in the power of their king and the certainty of the afterlife, Egypt enters its most ambitious era. until now, the age of the pyramids. More than 130 pyramids would be built throughout Egypt and represent the zenith in the royal tomb. They built enormous state-sponsored civil engineering projects that used vast resources of materials and labor. and time, the largest of them all, the great pyramid of king khufu, which took over 20 years to build and to build something so ambitious, an entire city was created specifically to house the construction workers just beyond This monumental wall was known as the Crow Wall and separated the silent sacred space of the dead from the bustling city of the pyramid builders.

This five hectare site once housed workshops, bakeries, a tool manufacturing facility and a fish processing area, as it was an integrated, self-sufficient community of over 8,000 people who even had their own healthcare. Anthropological archaeologist Dr. Richard Reading has been excavating the site since 1991. Where we are now, it is a kind of big workshop, a big industrial park where there is a lot of activity. probably using a granite statue maybe a granite column we find tools here to polish the granite we find tools here to chop the granite it is very well planned we have three streets we have the north street, the main street we are on and we have the south street down there, so we're walking, man, you're walking down the main street, the pyramid workers live side by side in two story barracks, you would have walked in, you would have been in a long, narrow, dark, very quiet room, here is where they would have If I had slept, there would have been a higher bed for the supervisor at each end and then everyone would have probably lay down with their heads in this direction or that direction exactly like this, you would be lying here like this and this would be your nighttime position. very comfortable can I try obviously sure you want to try the supervisor's bed there are delusions of grandeur is this or that yes it is that is the that is the wall you are the way right where you are oh so this is all true, if I sat here, yeah, the supervisor's bed is actually buried under a few centimeters of sand and the floor here is probably under about half a meter of sand, so this is nice, yeah, I'm keeping an eye on you now.

That's right, you can see me if I got up in the night and tried to sneak out to go somewhere. You would see me. Everything the workers needed was here on site. The team recovered data showing that workers consumed 74 cows and 257 sheep. goats each week this coral area could hold a weak supply of livestock before more were shipped from the grasslands of Egypt, it could have an almost on-time delivery coming down another small herd coming down from like whistles or from the delta coming down and in that it's a Well really -oiled machine now you can see how efficient the Egyptians were at getting their food by getting it to the right place at the right time to the right people it's absolutely brilliant, it wasn't just the food it was everything, there was copper to make tools, the stone was brought here from Osmond and other areas, so a lot of things were coming in here, these were government workers, they got everything from the government in many ways, this settlement is Egypt in a microcosm, a highly ordered social structure with work. specialization and mass cooperation it is difficult to believe that in a relatively short period of time Egypt had transformed from a mere subsistence to a united state that could sustain all those who worked on its behalf.

What we are seeing here is the latest building block in Egypt. culture, but not just for the pyramid era, as once this infrastructure was in place, it would never change, so whether they were building a pyramid or establishing a colossal statue, the level of organization and cooperation would still be the same, but this was the foundation stone of Egypt The pyramids are a timeless testament to how powerful Egypt had become and in many ways they are Egypt at this time dominating everything around it on a gigantic scale and towering over the landscape of Giza. find the great pyramid that was needed to build around 20,000 people.

Instead, the 2.3 million limestone blocks remained the tallest structure in the world for 3,800 years until the construction of Lincoln Cathedral in 1300 AD. It is a phenomenal achievement for any civilization in any era, but to me its exterior cannot be compared. To the feeling of awe once you venture inside the roof of the grand gallery, the hallway is built with multiple layers of enormous limestone slabs rising over eight meters high, huge masonry blocks built to a scale divine, that's surely what kufu wanted, I sincerely hope. The eternal resting place of the kufu was considerably less congested than it is today, but still offers a real atmosphere of the hustle and bustle that must have been here on a daily basis.

These guys were carrying huge blocks hundreds of feet up, literally, in the air. These guys were magicians. just look at how brilliantly these courses have been placed, they are perfect and if any modern architect could replicate this using the tools the ancients had at their disposal, here we are at the zenith, we are at the heart of the pyramid. now the burial chamber of King Kufu and we have arrived at exactly the right time because the pyramid is closed for lunch so we have the whole place to ourselves and you really get a sense of the sanctity of this divine mausoleum, the walls and ceiling. of the burial chamber are completely clad in granite and it was here that the body of the great king Khufu was sealed ready for his final journey to the afterlife at the heart of the pyramid in terms of its architecture, but we are literally in the At the heart of the Ancient Egypt, I feel like I should speak in a whisper because the acoustics are so extraordinary, it is a sterile and simple room, it is very much like a bank vault and when you think about it, that is exactly what it is, because it once contained the largest in Egypt. treasure the mummified body of the god king that contained the soul of not only kufu but of all the generations of pharaohs dating back to king narma forget the jewels forget the gold his real treasure was here and it is the first time I have been here without crowds nor crowds of other people and speaking now, the sound of the voice reverberating around him immediately takes him back four thousand five hundred years, to the day of the funeral, to the sacred words that the priests would have sung to revive the soul of the god king it's miraculous it's a wonderful and spectacular place that affects every sense visually audibly in every way it's beyond words I really think it's probably best that I stop talking now so now all the elements that made an Egypt patient were in their place, a well-fed one. highly organized population who unwaveringly followed their god king and all of whom abandoned this fervent belief in an afterlife in egypt it was good now of course none of this could last economic disaster and famine plunged egypt into chaos this it's ancient egypt beginning to suffer with the pharaoh's power was melting local warlords looted its most sacred sites egypt's dark age was approaching make no mistake this is the home of the dead